It's Time... from ACT III

by Elizabeth Aharonian Moon

Lately, she'd been going to wakes and funerals, looking at well-made up dead people, listening to bible passages about shepherds and pastures, singing hymns about amazing grace and Jesus. But it was the verses  about time that always caught her attention, causing her to drift into a drowsy reverie.

She remembered  time when she was little; it was time without clocks; time for lunch! her mother would call; Nap time! Dinner time! Time to pick up your toys! Story time!   Time back then had names, not numbers;  her mother would tell her it was noontime, or night time , snack time,  or bath time. These times, these names really, marked the great expanse that was her day.

She remembered growing up, not so little anymore, when, in school (or was it the nursery school in the church basement?)  that time became numbers.  Learning to tell time at home had been easier than learning to tie her shoes: the big hand is on the 6, the little hand is on  the 2, she'd report to her mother or her sister (never to her father).  Sometimes it was tricky—when both hands were stuck, one on top of the other, time seemed to stand perfectly still. Yet, she realized if she waited a bit, the big hand would jerk away, making the telling easy.  But it was in that school in the basement or maybe it was in kindergarten where she learned that time had different names—not her mother's names but seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. Time seemed to be divided up into units,  and somehow collected somewhere. There were weekends and seasons, quarter hours, holidays. But, no matter, time back then  to her was an endless, wide-open field, not fenced in or bordered by trees.She never thought of time gone by or time yet to come—rather, time was a vast Now.

Often, she would watch the classroom clock, white-faced and encased in shiny oak (only much later would she learn it was a Regulator Clock) tick away the minutes, the big black hand clicking noisily  as it jumped from minute to minute. Was she in fifth grade when she actually saw and understood time's passing?

She grew; time passed.  The watch she received for her thirteenth birthday reminded her of the time—if she remembered to wind it; if she didn't, she knew she had lost time, never to regain those minutes again. Sometimes she thought she needed more time, or that her gym teacher's  stop watch was against her,  its time racing forward invisibly without her.  As she approached adulthood, became a grown-up, time took on a profound significance; time became sophisticated, complicated. Watches had batteries, clocks had digital windows instead of faces,  airplanes flew through time zones. Time mattered and she learned to manage it, waste it, wish for more of it.

Growing old and then older she accumulated years as her young ones grew up, and their young ones grew big.  At a funeral,when the minister  read a passage from Ecclesiastes , she understood the power  and the truth of  those words:
       
       To everything there is a season, a time to weep, and a time to laugh...a time to get,
       and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast away...a time to be born and
       a time to die.

She would attend other funerals, other wakes, and no doubt, be lost in thought in most of them, but she knew, when her own time came, these were the words that would be read.                   .